The Tanzlinde of Ostheim

This lime is the thickest of Malsfeld's four guided lindens, 3.34 metres round, and by some distance the shortest, cropped back so hard and so often that it stands just 5 metres tall. What is missing in height it makes up in girth: a hollow, heavily pruned trunk that a 2017 survey still rated vital. It stands on a small sandstone common before Ostheim's church, on ground once used as a court site, the same combination of dance floor and judgment seat that runs through every guided linden in this corner of Hessen. The Elisabethpfad, a pilgrimage route named for the 13th-century Landgravine Elisabeth of Thuringia, passes close by. Ostheim's tree was not on any list until a Wikimedia contributor's survey of the district's surviving guided lindens turned it up alongside its neighbours in Berndshausen, Dagobertshausen and Hilgershausen, all within a few kilometres. Together the four are what is left of a custom that used to be common across the region and now mostly is not.